Category: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) has made it easier for you to create and modify your IAM policies by using a point-and-click visual editor in the IAM console. The new visual editor guides you through granting permissions using IAM policies without requiring you to write the policy in JSON (although you can still author and edit policies in JSON, if you prefer). This update to the IAM console makes it easier to grant least privilege permissions for the AWS service actions you select by listing all the supported resource types and request conditions you can specify. And, as with policy summaries, the visual editor also identifies and helps you correct unrecognized services and actions and permissions errors when you import existing policies. In this blog post, I give a brief overview of policy concepts and show you how to create a new policy by using the visual editor.

Earlier this year, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) introduced service-linked roles, which provide you an easy and secure way to delegate permissions to AWS services. Each service-linked role delegates permissions to an AWS service, which is called its linked service. Service-linked roles help with monitoring and auditing requirements by providing a transparent way to […]

March 12, 2024: We updated step 7 of this post. August 8, 2022: We made minor updates to some of the steps and images for resetting a lost MFA device. To help secure your AWS resources, AWS recommends that you follow the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) best practice of enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) […]

In March, we made it easier to view and understand the permissions in your AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies by using IAM policy summaries. Today, we updated policy summaries to help you identify and correct errors in your IAM policies. When you set permissions using IAM policies, for each action you specify, you […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has granted the AWS GovCloud (US) Region an Impact Level 5 (IL5) Department of Defense (DoD) Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (CC SRG) Provisional Authorization (PA) for six core services. This means that AWS’s DoD customers and partners can now deploy workloads for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) exceeding IL4 […]

Today, we updated the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console to make it easier for you to create, manage, and understand IAM roles. We made improvements that include an updated role-creation workflow that better guides you through the process of creating trust relationships (which define who can assume a role) and attaching permissions to roles. Additionally, […]

Today, AWS made improvements to the way you sign in to your AWS account. Whether you sign in as your account’s root user or an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user, you can now sign in from the AWS Management Console’s homepage. This means that if you sign in as an IAM user, you […]

To help you grant access to specific resources and conditions, the Example Policies page in the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) documentation now includes more than thirty policies for you to use or customize to meet your permissions requirements. The AWS Support team developed these policies from their experiences working with AWS customers over the years. […]

Update from August 25, 2017: These improvements are now live. For more details, see Now Available: Improvements to How You Sign In to Your AWS Account. Coming soon, AWS will improve the way you sign in to your AWS account. Whether you sign in as your account’s root user or an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) […]

Today, we added new information to the Users section of the AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) console to make it easier for you to follow IAM best practices. With this new information, you can more easily monitor users’ activity in your AWS account and identify access keys and passwords that you should rotate regularly. You can […]